Last Lecture Series: How to Design a Winnable Game – Graham Weaver

Change lives, change organization, change the world. >> Speaker 2: Welcome the man who pushes us to dream bigger and live louder. Your limiting beliefs.

Worst nightmare. Graham Weaver. >> Speaker 1: Thank you.

The lowest point of my career was October of 2008, and Lehman Brothers had just blown up. About three weeks earlier, I had started a private equity fund and the market was down 40%. And that particular day in 2008, my largest investor had called me and said that he wasn't going to be able to come in my fund because they had no money.

And he said something scarier at the end of that call that I remember. He said, you're probably going to get this call from just about every single one of your investors. And he was right.

That night, I tried to go to sleep. I didn't sleep one second. I'm tossing, I'm turning.

I'm just, like, getting nowhere. And so I'm like, all right, I bet I might as well get up. I go up to my home office and I bring out, break out my spreadsheet.

I'm like, well, we're not going to have a fund anytime soon. So I calculate how many months we could continue making payroll and I could keep paying my mortgage before I blew through my entire savings. And the answer was 12, which was not what I was hoping for.

So I close my laptop and I look across the room, and my home office was also doubling as my daughter's bedroom. My daughter's two weeks old at the time, so she is sleeping very soundly. She seems to be taking the collapse of the US Housing market in stride.

And I get. All of a sudden, I get really, really emotional because I start to realize that she doesn't realize it at the time, but she is counting on her dad to figure this out. And Dad's not figuring this out.

It's not going well. It's not going well at all. I had worked.

I felt like I was doing all the right things. I was working super hard. I went to these brand name firms on Wall street, and then I started my own fund.

And I was working as hard as I could, but I. I wasn't winning. I was about to run out of money.

And it just wasn't going the way that I drew it up at all. So that night, I just sat there contemplating what was going on. And I had this realization that I want to share with you.

Which is, the realization was, I think I'd been asking the wrong question the whole time. The question I had been asking was, how do I play this game? Better, faster, stronger, you know, hit the more button Grind it out.

And I've been doing that for 14 years, since I graduated, and it wasn't working. So I said, all right, I'm going to ask myself a different question. Question I'm going to ask that I is, am I playing the right game at all?

And the answer I knew right then in my gut was like, no. Resounding no. So I started saying, well, how could I design a winnable game?

And the winnable game, the way I defined it, was a game that you can win, a game that you want to win, you're excited to play, and a game where if you actually play that game, it's going to bring you closer to the person that you really want to be. And maybe if I had to simplify it, it'd be something like, the external success and your internal fulfillment aren't in conflict, but they're actually in the same game. And so that's what I want to share with all of you today.

I want to share four steps that I came up with to help you try to design and play a winnable game. So the first step is choose a game that stirs your blood. So that night In October of 2008, I went back and I thought, like, when was a time in my life when I was really, really fired up to play this game?

And when was I. When did I feel like I was actually really winning? And I went back to college, and I rode crew in college, and I was one of 70 freshmen who went out for the rowing team.

I'd never rode before. I grew up in Ohio, in Northwest Ohio, went to a public school. I didn't even know that the boats went backwards.

So I, like, go out for the team, and three weeks in, they post the boats of the people that made the team. My name's not on the list, maybe not surprisingly. And so they said, okay, if your name's not on this list, you get to be a land warrior.

You get to use the rowing equipment and, you know, but. But you don't get to go on the boats. I'm like, okay, no problem.

So that night, I do some calculus, and I'm like, okay, there's the women's team and the heavyweight and lightweight, and there's all going to be all these landwears flooding the boathouse. So I get down the boathouse at 6am the first one there, I get on the rowing machine. I'm rowing.

And by the way, it would turn out no one else would come down because landwear was really just a euphemism for your Cut, you dumbass. And. And so I'm rowing on the rowing machine and about 30 minutes in, this guy comes and he's like three rowing machines over.

And it's not a student, it's like a 31 year old guy, he's got this mustache, he's this massive guy. And he just starts hammering this rowing machine. I've never heard it make a noise like that.

Is he's not doing it like one time. He's doing it for like an hour and 15 minutes in. I had turned this fan on.

The fan is blowing the sweat that he's hitting into me. And I'm thinking his sweat underneath him is starting to creep toward me. And I'm thinking, am I supposed to move?

What am I supposed to do here? Anyway, so this goes on this routine that we have. The two of us go down to the boathouse.

This goes on for about a week. Never acknowledges me at all. I would later find out that this person was Mike Taty.

And Mike would go on to row in three Olympics and win a bronze medal. And then he would coach the US team in 2004 to a gold medal. So he was a pretty big deal in US rowing.

But anyway, he didn't even acknowledge. Acknowledge me till about a weekend. And he acknowledged me by giving me kind of one of these like this.

And I played it. I was like, I played it really cool. So I gave him one of these and then he kind of gave me one of these.

And then that set us back another couple weeks. But then three weeks in, we're sitting in the locker room and I think Mike's curiosity just got the better of him. And he said, he's like, who are you?

And I said, I'm Graham. I'm a land warrior. Who are you?

And he said, well, I'm Mike. And he said, well, Graham, what are you doing down here every morning? By the way, I also see you sometimes in the afternoon practice.

Like, what are you doing? And I said, what are you training for? Like.

And I said I'm. I said, I'm a land where I'm trying to make the third string novice freshman lightweight team. And he said, well, Graham, your form is terrible, but I'll tell you one thing, if you keep training the way that you're training, you'll make the Olympic team.

And I remember just this huge surge of energy came into me when this person I'd been watching, who was this Adonis of rowing, told me that I love this quote by Daniel Burum. He says, make no little plans for they have no power to stir one's blood. The first blood that you need to stir is your own.

And rowing stirred my blood. And being an Olympian, or even the idea of being Olympian, stirred my blood. And so what I knew back then about goal setting, I learned from this guy named Brian Tracy.

I listened to one of his audiobooks. I think he's one of the leading writers on goals. And what he said is, write down your three most important goals every day and write them in the present tense as though you'd already achieved them, and then write what you're going to do to move toward it.

So I wrote. I had this green spiral notebook, and I wrote down every day, I am an Olympian. And I wrote down the three things I was going to do to move toward that goal.

And a funny thing happened. I started. A part of me started believing that I already was an Olympian the day that I set that goal and started writing it down.

And every time I did one of those things on that list, which was typically workouts or eating well or whatever it was, I started assuming more and more of the identity of an Olympian. And when you choose a goal that stirs your blood, there's a part of you that will assume the identity of someone who's already achieved this goal. And.

And this is an incredibly powerful force. And now just writing your goal down doesn't make everything. Rainbows and unicorns.

I lost more seat races than I won. I didn't make the team. I want the boat.

I wanted my freshman year, my sophomore year, my junior year. And so it doesn't just happen overnight. My endurance didn't change overnight, my strength didn't change overnight.

But I did get a lot better. And by my senior year I made, I made the varsity team, I was elected captain, our team won nationals, and for one, at one moment I had one of, if not the top 2000 meter time in the country. So then I started thinking that night in October, I was looking back and saying, well, what are we doing at Alpine?

You know, what, what's my equivalent of the Olympic goal at Alpine? And what, you know, when things really weren't going that well. So this is what we were, this is what we had been working on.

Generate attractive risk adjusted returns while maximizing the probability of capital preservation. Let's go. Who's with me?

You know, who wants to do. And, and like this is really, it's humorous but like this is actually really, really scary. And, and, and this is a big part of what I'm trying to communicate today, which is what happens to all of us is that there's a point in our lives where we have these incredible hopes and dreams.

We have confidence, you know, we want to go take over the world. We have all these amazing things that we want to do and, and then life intervenes and we might have heartbreak, we might have loss, we might have setbacks, you know, things don't go the way we want. We might have people in our lives telling us, you know, that we can't do things or we're not enough, or we might have a job where things don't go the way we want.

And little by little we start to lower our object, our goals. We start to not believe in ourselves and think maybe we're not enough. And so we end up with a goal like this.

So rather than setting a goal and being Olympian, we have the equivalent, which I would say this is of hitting, of trying to make the third string lightweight novice team. And we settle for this. And there's two huge problems with this.

The first problem is you will assume the identity of someone who's working on this goal. And if you read this goal carefully, what it's really saying is try not to lose money. And so I assume the identity of someone who's like holding on tightly to Alpine.

We can't invest in this. We can't do that. And we're never going to, you know, we're not going to be big and we have to stay in this little box.

And that was the identity that I had assumed and why we weren't winning, by the way. And the second big problem is you're setting off on a life journey that you don't care if you win or not. And that might sound really obvious, but it's not a winnable game if you're not excited to win the game.

And so many people, that's the journey that you set off on. So we started asking ourselves a better question. And the question, if you've taken my class or seen any of my content, is what would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?

And this is my favorite question. I would encourage you to ask yourself this question maybe every month at least, and answer this question in all the different areas of your life. What would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?

We had a hard time even answering this question. There were so many doubts and fears and limiting belief and past history and losses and things that kept clouding us that we almost couldn't even answer this question. It literally took us months to come up with an answer.

But we came up with our equivalent of becoming an Olympian. And it was this. Be the number one performing private equity fund in the world and deliver 5x on every single fund.

And just to give you an Idea of the 5x, the top 25% of private equity firms in any vintage deliver about 1. 8x to 2x. So we are going to be several standard deviations better.

This was our equivalent of make the Olympics. And by the way, at the time when we set this goal, it was the equivalent, equivalently aspirational of me setting the goal of being Olympian when I was 135 pound mullet sporting novice who never rode from Ohio. That's kind of where we were at the time we set this goal.

And a funny thing happened. We started showing up as though we were the people that were capable of achieving that goal. We started investing in different kinds of companies.

We started attracting different people to the who wanted to come with us on the journey that we were on. And it hasn't been rainbows and unicorns. We've had lost money on deals, we've had people leave, we've had CEOs not work out, we've had everything you could imagine.

But we delivered 5x on the four funds that we invested subsequent to setting this goal. Or three of them. And the fourth is on its way.

We did it our way. I've been writing my goals down now for 40 years and I want to share the most important thing that I learned. And if you take nothing else from today, I want you either take a picture mentally or physically of, of this, which is you will have a higher probability of achieving an aspirational goal that you're excited about than you will of a more moderate goal.

There's a reason for this. It's because you will show up differently. You will assume the identity of someone capable of achieving that goal.

You will crowd out unnecessary distractions, you will attract different people on your journey and most importantly, you will stay with it a lot longer. Ironically, when you think you're playing it safe by setting a more modest goal, you're actually have a lower chance of hitting that goal. I want to just address one thing, I think because I post a lot on social media about setting goals.

On my feed, I get all these people talking about manifesting. I don't know if you get that on your feed or not, but I do. And these people will say things like, close your eyes and say money comes freely and easily to me.

And then they're going to see dollar bills everywhere and money's just going to start. And I'm just like, I don't know what these people are talking about. This is not what I'm saying.

For the avoidance of doubt, what I am saying is have a North Star in your life that gets you out of bed. Have something that is your definite purpose that you're excited about. That is where you're aligning your calendar and your goals and your emotional energy toward.

Have something like that that you're excited about in your lifetime and you'll see your energy aligned behind it. If you want to play a winnable game, choose a goal that stirs your blood. Step two is design your own game.

So we, by the way, for the avoidance of doubt, when we set that goal of 5x, we had absolutely no idea how we were going to do it. But we did know one thing, which is there's no way we were going to hit that by doing what everyone else was doing. So we needed to design our own game.

The crowded path that is clearly marked is almost never where you're going to find your winnable game. And yet the world will conspire to have you play exactly this game because it's crowded and well lit and clearly marked. If you think of the people that you admire, authors, musicians, poets, entrepreneurs, what you'll notice if you look carefully, is they all played their own game.

They found a game no one else was playing, and. And in doing so, they lived into who they were. And that's what I'm going to invite all of you to do.

Most games you'll find have very few rules. When we started thinking about the rules in private equity, there's all these conventions, all these things. You back existing management, you do this, sell the companies, you hold it, this.

And none of that was actually true. It turned out we only came up with three rules, which is investors give us money, we have to give them money back at some point, hopefully more than they gave us. And in between, we wanted to act with ethically and according to our values.

And those are the only three rules that we came up with. All the rest was just. Just conventional wisdom.

So we started asking some questions to try to unearth places that no one else was looking. We wanted to find diamonds in the rough. So here's some questions we came up with.

What do customers hate about this industry or experience? And there were a lot of things on that list. What are your competitors unwilling to do?

What's a problem that breaks your heart? What assumptions are you making? And finally, what do you believe to be true that not that many people agree with you on?

And when we started unearthing these questions, we found all kinds of diamonds. We found green shoots everywhere of places that no one else was looking. And then we came up with our most powerful question.

Question of all, which is what are your bright spots? What's going well? So we are all loss averse and we, we tend to look at what's broken and want to fix it.

We look at our weaknesses and want to correct them. But the real magic is not in any of that. Probably 90% of all the great things we've done at Alpine have come from scaling the things that are working.

So we looked at our portfolio and we said, well, what's working? And, and, and we, we cut the data every way you would imagine. Growth rate, leverage, more, all this stuff.

And the only thing we could find, our three best deals have seemingly, seemingly nothing in common except one thing, which is that they happen to have gone so poorly that we took someone from our own team and put them in to run the company or someone from our network. And those ended up being our best companies, by the way. They were also the most fun because we're sitting in the board meeting with someone that we, you know, that we had put in and were together, we're at the same values and we're talking about how we're going to build this incredible business.

So it was, it was, it was not only the most our best deals, but it was also the most fun. So we said to ourselves, what if we just did that? What if we backed our own teams every time?

And then we get this flood of conventional wisdom. You shouldn't change management. It's hard by the way.

We don't have management, we don't know how to source deals. And so we kind of like let it go. We said, well, we can't really do that.

And then the realization we had was that's the work, you know, that's the work. The work isn't to play the game everyone else is playing, only better, faster, harder. The work is in using your creativity to create the capabilities to play the game you really want to play.

And so we spent a lot of time on that and then when we started doing that, we realized the world needed this too. 80% of companies didn't have a succession plan for management so they needed someone to come in and run those businesses. When you can find the intersection of a problem that the world that needs to be solved and a place that gives you energy, that's where you're going to find your edge.

And some might even call this your purpose. But this takes a little while and you have to look for this and you have to spend time on it. We spent a full day, a week outside the office for about six months to Come up with this idea.

If you want to play a winnable game, choose a game that stirs your blood and design your own game. Step three is play the game with people you admire. My first job on Wall Street, I had this boss, and I will, just to protect his name, I'll call him Larry.

And one Saturday night, it's 8:30pm and I'm. I'm working on a financial model, by the way, it's a financial model for a company we didn't own for a deal we were never going to do, for a vice president who didn't ask for it, probably you all had worked on something like that. So it's 8:30 at night.

I'm working on this. Larry is standing about 3 inches behind me and he's barking out commands. And he couldn't make that line thicker, make that column narrower.

Helvetica font how many times have I told you? You know, and this is literally the relationship that this is our date night on Saturday nights. And, and this.

And I put up with this. You know, this is kind of our normal thing. Except this particular night I was really bummed because my mom was in town and my mom and I are really close, and she had driven out from Harrysburg, Ohio, and she was a single mom at the time, and she had picked out some restaurants that she wanted to hang out with.

And I'm picturing her being at one of those restaurants while I'm making lines thicker for Larry. So it was not a great evening. Fast forward to the end of that year and it's time for bonus.

Larry completely dings me on my bonus. Like, he gives me like a 25% haircut. And I said, larry, what the heck?

You know, I worked so many hours. I worked 80, 90, 100 hours. I did everything that you ever asked.

He said, well, you know, Graham, it wasn't really your work, it wasn't your hours. You know, those were all fine. It was.

I just wanted to send you a message, you know, I wanted you to be hungrier because if you were hungry, you wouldn't have asked to leave during an analysis to go have dinner with your mom. So that was my first experience out of work. That was my first year.

So fast forward to starting Alpine. And around the time I started Alpine, I also had my first son, Chase. And so two years in, Chase is two.

And I don't really know how to be a dad or how to. I was just a new, new dad and a new founder. So anyway, my cha Cha, my wife would take Chase to This program called Side By Side.

And it's like pre, pre, pre, pre K. I mean, he's 2 years old. The agenda's like snack time, story time, recess, and, and, and.

And she's like, cram. You have to do this. It's so much fun.

It's the cutest thing ever. You've gotta. You've gotta come and like, at this point, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

Like, am I. Do you take time off work to go to do this in the middle of the day? Like, I'm trying to figure all this out, right?

I'm a new. I'm a new dad. So on Monday.

So Side By Side was on Tuesday. So on Monday we have our partner meeting with all the partners at Alpine. And.

And we get through all of our business, whatever, and we have like 15 minutes at the end. And I'm. I'm kind of like, poking around to see, like, what.

What's going to happen. So I'm like, you know, there's this. There's this thing.

It's side by side. It's tomorrow. You know, they let dads go.

And I'm kind of like, testing the waters. And I'm really nervous about doing this because I have some scar tissue from, from Larry and. And my partner Billy just interrupts me and he says, graham, you mean they let dads go?

That's awesome. Yeah, I'll take your meetings. Like, yeah, that'll be so much fun.

You'll send me pictures. I can't wait to hear all about it. And I just remember this wave of, like, relief just came over me because I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to navigate all this stuff, but I know who I'm going to do it with.

And I know I'm going to do it with people that really care about me as a person. And it's been the most amazing journey ever. And Billy would go on to have kids of his own and coach them and travel around the country with his kids playing sports.

I would get to go to all my music recitals of my kids and parent teacher conferences. I took all three of my kids to Side by Side and went to lots of sporting events. And it's just been an amazing journey.

And my. My two boys are in college now, so I don't have as many of those opportunities, but I wouldn't have traded. There's.

There's nothing I would trade for those opportunities. I look back sometimes and I think to myself, what would that conversation on Monday have been like with Larry, you know, how would that have gone? And I can tell you how it would have gone, which is I never would have had it.

Instead, I would have just played through, and I would have worn it as a badge of honor that I could just play through these. These things that were going on in my life and prioritize work. And the reason that I know that is because I stayed on Wall street for two more years after that, and I played through.

You know, my mom didn't come to visit again in the next two years, so I didn't ask for time off to go see her. My girlfriend got promoted, had a promotion, and her roommate threw her surprise party. I played through.

I had multiple friends of mine have big birthday parties, and I played through. I didn't go to those. And I even missed two of my best friends weddings.

So life would have been a lot different had I aligned my life with people that had very different values than I did. That's not the worst part. The scariest part is I started to become Larry.

And I wonder if I had stayed on Wall street for a another year or two, if I would have been the associate telling an analyst that they couldn't have dinner with their mom when she came to town. The people in your life will shape your goals, your values, and ultimately your identity. So choose the people with whom you share your life very carefully.

If you want to play a winnable game, choose a game that stirs your blood. Design your own game and play with people you admire. My final point is play now.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing you your life will start when. And, and I know many of you having lunch and coffees with you say very similar things to that I say all the time, which is my life will start when I'll do this, when, when I finally pay off my business school loans, when I finally get this promotion, when I get this new job, when I'm actually in the right job, when I have the right relationship, when I have kids, when my kids are older, when I pay off my mortgage, when, when, when, when. And for a long time I always thought that there was something to be gotten from through before my life was really going to start.

And what I've realized is those things that you're getting through, that is your life and your life starts now. And it starts in those things. The two most dangerous words that students say, and I hear them all the time, are, Graham, I have this thing I really want to do.

I'm excited about it. Just, they never say no. In 22 years, no student has ever said, I'm not going to do it.

They say, not now. Winnable games aren't found, they're designed and you never know where you're going to find them. I never thought I would find my meaning and purpose in a private, running a private equity firm.

So you don't know where you're going to find it, so you might as well start looking for it right now. You don't need to start your own firm to start trying to design your own winnable game. But I can tell you where you're not going to find your winnable game.

You're not going to find it on the sidelines. You're not going to find it by being half in and half out. You're not going to find it by waiting around for life to really start and being hedged.

If you're not careful, you can spend your whole life there. You're going to find your passion by being passionate about the life that you're in right now, no matter what the situation is. So what I shared with you today are four steps to designing a winnable game.

A game where you can combine something that you're really excited about, something that matters to you, a game you can win. And ultimately a game where just playing the game alone allows you to be the person that you really want to be. If you follow these steps and can find that alignment, I think that's what winning really looks like.

So, class of 2025, let's play now. Now is the time to choose a game that stirs your blood. Ask yourself the question, what would I do?

If I knew, I wouldn't fail. Ask yourself that often until the answer becomes really clear to you. And then write that down and start moving toward it.

And you will assume the identity of someone who's already achieved that goal. Remember, you will have a higher probability of achieving a goal that you're excited about than you will of a more moderate goal. And playing big is the real you.

Now is the time to design your game. Realize that most rules aren't rules at all. They're just conventional wisdom.

And most games really have very few rules. Look for problems that break your heart. Look for places that other people aren't looking.

Scale your bright spots, both your wins and the things that give you energy. When you can combine something that the world needs with something you're excited about, that's where you're really going to light up. That's where you're going to find your purpose.

Play the game with people you admire. Find the people who give you energy and share your values and share your life with them and avoid the people who don't. Your goals and values and ultimately your identity will come from the people with whom you share your life.

And I can promise you, when you look back, almost every single one of your favorite memories will involve someone that you really care about. And finally, play now. The two most dangerous words are not now.

And waiting on the sidelines is not where you're going to find your winnable game. Waiting on the sidelines is just fear in another form. You never know where your winnable game is, so you might as well start looking for it where you are right now.

You will find your passion by being passionate about your life that you're leading. Class of 2025. You're ready.

You are enough. And the game starts now. What game will you play with this one precious life of yours?

Thank you. Thank you.